ABSTRACT
Silvina Ocampo is one of the Latin American masters of the grotesque, along with Virgilio Piñera in Cuba and Felisberto Hernández in Uruguay. Her stories and some of her poems tell of a world upside down—the transvestite saint Teodora in the 1984 book of poems Breve santoral [Short Book of Saints], the children who build a world to their measure in the story “La raza inextinguible” [The Invincible Race]—a world where extreme acts of cruelty express love, where the finding of lost possessions becomes the source of disquieting misfortune, where a character’s knowledge of the future is interpreted by others as a blatant lack of sensitivity.
